The Bounty Between the Tides

The day that I met Alanna Kieffer was spectacularly sunny with a gentle saline breeze—a rarity on the rainy Oregon coast. It was my first visit to Cannon Beach, but Kieffer appeared to be perfectly at home as she led me across the pale, soft sand to a cluster of craggy, dark rocks at the edge of the sea. As a coastal forager and educator, this stretch of the Pacific Coast is her office, her classroom, her kitchen, and the inspiration for founding her own company, Shifting Tides. 

Kieffer founded Shifting Tides in February 2023 to teach people about intertidal ecosystems—the unique space where the ocean meets the land, which transforms hour by hour as the tide flows in and out—and how they impact our day-to-day lives, especially when it comes to what we eat.

Kieffer leads visitors on tours of the Oregon coast, where she harvests and then prepares a meal with wild seaweed and shellfish right on the beach. I had previously obtained a state license for the right to harvest with her-/rather than merely watch—so, after she demonstrated the proper technique, I was handed a small knife and we worked side by side to carefully remove mussels and gooseneck barnacles from a massive triangular rock slick with saltwater. Enthusiasm radiated from Kieffer as she offered advice and information, but it was frilly neon green seaweed that caused her to truly light up. 

“In Oregon, the seaweed harvest season is from March to June 15th, with a limit of a one-gallon bag of seaweed per day and only three bags per year,” says Kieffer . “The regulations are such that you need to use a knife or scissors to remove seaweeds, and it is actually illegal to pull the holdfast, or root-like anchor, from the rock. This allows them to regrow year after year. It does regenerate quickly, but we should never be harvesting all of what a given area has and should be leaving plenty intact for wild species to utilize.”

Seaweed is a key component of what Kieffer considers to be “climate cuisine,” which includes foraged and farmed foods that positively impact our climate. A primary example is the wild bull kelp pickles that she makes and serves to those who join her with Shifting Tides, which have a pleasantly vinegary, spicy flavor and firm crunch. Participants also have a chance to try the dulse seaweed that she farms and pan fries in olive oil for a delightfully crispy, salty snack. During my tour, I sampled the dulse before and after Kieffer cooked it, and I liked it in its raw form, too—mildly briny in taste and slightly chewy; reminiscent of the sea, but not so different from terrestrial leafy greens. Given the versatility of this specific seaweed, she uses it in and on all kinds of foods, including homemade pasta, vegan Caesar salad dressing, and everything bagel seasoning. 

Seaweed is the primary focus of Kieffer’s work as an educator, forager, and farmer. When she is not leading Shifting Tides tours, Kieffer works as part of a small team at Oregon Seaweed, a local seaweed farm where she has been helping to grow a variety called Pacific Dulse since 2021. Much of their seaweed is sold fresh (about $15 per pound) or dried to nearby restaurants and home cooks, but it is also available for worldwide shipping. As plant-based and environmentally conscious food trends become more widespread, Oregon Seaweed is well poised to address the growing global market demand for seaweed, which was valued at more than $17 billion in 2023 and is expected to double in the next decade. 

“One of the things I love about both of my jobs is that there are not two days in a week that look the same,” says Kieffer. “With Oregon Seaweed, some days I’m outside on the farm all day, cleaning tanks, drying and packaging seaweeds; others, I’m at restaurants teaching chefs how to cook dulse, or at markets talking to customers about it; others, I’m on the computer all day answering emails or dealing with online sales. For Shifting Tides, it’s the same—there’s so much time outside at low tide teaching people and cooking with folks.” 

Kieffer’s schedule ebbs and flows depending on both the tides and the tourism season. In good weather, she may have tours scheduled 10 days in a row and a workshop every weekend. Each of her roles has its own particular responsibilities, but there are clear throughlines between them. 

“Being that seaweed is a less popular food in our culture, a lot of my work with seaweed is teaching people how and why to use it,” says Kieffer. “The topic of eating seaweed is a segway into so many other amazing conservation efforts around food. 

“Regenerative aquaculture is giving back to the environment, rather than just taking from or having a neutral effect on it, and requires no or very minimal inputs to grow food,” explains Kieffer. “Seaweeds, for instance, require sunlight and natural nutrients; no freshwater, herbicides, or pesticides. They are removing carbon dioxide from the water through the process of photosynthesis as well as excess nutrients like nitrogen, which can have positive effects on the local ecosystem.”

The dulse that Kieffer farms at Oregon Seaweed, for example, has the capacity to sequester one pound of carbon for every four pounds of seaweed grown. Out in the wild, Kieffer harvests about 10 different varieties of seaweed, including: nori, kombu, wakame, sugar kelp, pepper dulse, and sea spaghetti. Several of these will be well known to sushi lovers, but few people would know where to buy the seaweed on its own, let alone what it looks like in its natural form. 

Given her sense of perfect ease while navigating the hidden nooks and crannies of Cannon Beach, I was surprised to learn that it was not Kieffer’s native habitat. She was born in New York City and came to Oregon as a teenager. Soon after, she began working for an environmental education company in the intertidal ecosystems. She immediately fell in love.

“I grew up in a family of chefs, restaurant owners, cookbook editors, and overall food lovers, so I was born with a deep connection to food whether I realized it or not,” says Kieffer. “As soon as I moved to the beach, I got away from food service and began working alongside our oceans. I learned so much about food systems and ultimately what goes into getting food from the ocean to our plates.” 

On my visit to Cannon Beach, Kieffer pointed out starfish smaller than my thumbnail suctioned to shells latched to the rocks around tide pools. She told me about sculpin (a type of narrow fish with a wide mouth) that live among sea lettuce and camouflage themselves to match their green hue.

Since founding Shifting Tides over a year ago, Kieffer has explored the ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest with people of all ages from all over the country. “At the beginning, it was mostly people from Oregon. Now, by partnering with some hotels on the coast as well as destination management organizations, like Travel Oregon and Oregon Coast Visitors Association, I have been teaching many people who aren’t from the area at all—college students from Wyoming, executive groups from Tennessee, couples from Texas.” 

While visitors may not have access to the same exact wild seafoods when they return home, they come away with an understanding of regenerative food systems that is applicable anywhere. 

“There are so many people working hard to bring food from the sea to our table in a way that is sustainable and helps coastal communities,” says Kieffer. “Telling stories of the people, practices, science, and conservation along our coast over a meal of foraged and farmed seaweeds is truly a dream.”

Kieffer’s dream is the reality that we need. As I watched her sautee seaweed on a portable seafoam green grill just yards from where we had harvested it, I felt a kind of hope that is rarer than a blue-sky day in Oregon. There is no single, simple fix for our food system, but Shifting Tides shows the valuable work already being done and invites us to join in.

The post The Bounty Between the Tides appeared first on Modern Farmer.